


We'd Be Strangers In The End

by masterofmidgets



Category: Sinbad (TV)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, M/M, Magic, Multi, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:51:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofmidgets/pseuds/masterofmidgets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a small farm in the north, Gunnar's wife makes bread while he tends the animals. Something isn't right here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'd Be Strangers In The End

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muccamukk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Muccamukk!

  
  


Gunnar wakes up alone. In the half-light of early dawn he fumbles for his wife, and grimaces when there is only empty space beside him. It’s been enough years that he should know better, but every morning he’s disappointed that she isn’t there when he opens his eyes.

He drags the sheepskin tighter around him, and tries to pretend it isn’t morning yet, that nothing needs to be done. But now that he’s listening for it he can hear the sound that woke him  - the steady wet rhythm of hands working dough. He rolls over on the bench to see. The hearth fire in the middle of the hall is banked and glowing, and next to it his wife is making bread.

He’s tempted to sit there the rest of the morning and watch her, the sleeves of her shift pushed up to reveal her arms as she works, her hair escaping in wispy curls from its knot. But that would mean he didn’t get to touch, so instead he crosses the room silently while her back is turned, and before she notices him he grabs her from behind.

She laughs and swats at him, but he only clutches her tighter, both arms wrapped around her waist.

“Come back to bed,” he says, the words muffled as he presses lingering kisses into her hair. “The bread can wait.”

He tries to further his argument by moving his hands down, but she catches him at it and grabs them. Her hands are warmer than his, and sticky with bread dough.

“Lazy barbarian. Always abed when there’s work to be done, always trying to drag me back into it. If I listened to you we’d never leave it.” She almost sounds stern but she’s still laughing at him, and she hasn’t let go of his hands.

“That’s because I married the most beautiful woman in the north,” he says. “No one could blame me.”

It’s a well-worn argument, and as he does every morning Gunnar lets himself be steered back toward the bench where they slept, where he left his trousers and shoes, and his wife lets him steal a few more kisses. It wouldn’t take much pressing to change her mind, but she’s right that there’s plenty of work, and while he doesn’t mind waiting for his breakfast the cows probably will.

Gunnar remembers the first year they were married, and so poor they wintered the cow and chickens in the longhouse with them, penned up in the pantry because they had nowhere else to keep them. Now, after five good harvests, they have stone-and-timber outbuildings for the cows and the sheep, a small herd of each to fill them, and money set aside to buy more at the spring market. It’s a small farm yet, but prosperous, and Gunnar is proud of what they’ve made of it.

Gunnar waters and feeds the animals, rakes out their pens, and milks the cows. When he comes back into the house, heavy pails of milk braced on his shoulders, his wife is just giving the flat barley bread the last turn on the pan, and by the time he’s settled she has a bowl of skyr and hot bread ready for him.

“More work on the wall today?” she asks as he gulps down breakfast.

He should - the wall around the back garden needs to be shored up before it’s warm enough to set the cows to pasture, and that’s only a few weeks off. But it’s back-breaking work hauling the heavy stones, with no brothers or bondsmen to help him, and his neck and shoulders twinge just thinking about it. He shakes his head and grins at her.

“How would you like fresh fish for dinner?”

  
  


It’s too early for salmon yet, but when Bjorn from the next valley came through last week he said there was good fishing in the pools off the west ford, and that’s where Gunnar goes. It’s only a few miles from the farm, but it feels like farther, especially when he reaches that height of the ridge where scrubby grass gives way to patches of spruce.

As he goes deeper into the forest and the watery winter sunlight turns greenish under the trees, quiet falls around him, thick and unsettling. Once or twice he thinks he hears his name, faint but insistent in some stranger’s voice, but there’s no one in sight. He strains so hard to hear these half-imagined sounds that he doesn’t hear the crash of someone stumbling lost through the trees. He doesn’t even notice the man until he nearly walks into him.

Although man might be too generous a term. He reminds Gunnar of the half-grown lads that cluster around the horse pens at the fair, all jutting elbows and patchy scruff, eyes bugged wide with the effort of trying to take in everything at once. And he’s been wandering lost for awhile, to judge by the smear of mud on the hem of his loose gown, and the twigs stuck in his hair.

“Hello,” the boy says brightly. “I did hope I’d find you here.”

Gunnar stares at him. He doesn’t look like a madman, despite the twigs. But they don’t, always, and he has nothing to defend himself but a belt knife and a fish spear. The lad sees him edging back, and his smile fades a bit.

“Not, uh, you, of course,” he says. “I don’t know you, do I? But I hoped I’d find someone here. I think I’ve gotten lost. Possibly. I know the captain’s mate said to go north at the ford.”

Gunnar cuts him off; he can tell if he doesn’t the man won’t stop babbling until the wolves get him. “You were going east.”

“Really? Are you sure? Because -”

“See the sun?” Gunnar waves a hand. Even with the trees it should have been easy to track. “East.”

He sags. “Oh. Well. So much for finding Kaupang before sunset, then.”

Gunnar could set him in the right direction and continue on to the ford. But he looks so dejected he feels guilty even thinking about it, and from the state he’s in Gunnar doesn’t trust him to make it to the road without falling into a ditch, or getting eaten by something. His wife won’t be happy with him, but that’s only because she didn’t see the lad’s face.

His name is Anwar, and that’s all that Gunnar lets him get out before he strides off down the narrow track between the trees. He sets a brisk pace, hoping to leave Anwar scrambling behind him, or at least too breathless to keep talking. To his irritation, though, he’s better at following along than he was at navigating, and he keeps up with him easily. Every time Gunnar glances over, he’s just behind him, robes hiked up and knotted around one hand as he shoves his way through the brush.

Gunnar’s tall and broad enough that he can force his way past most of the overhanging branches, but Anwar keeps having to duck and push leaves out of his face. One of the branches catches on his shoulder and smears pine sap down his arm, and Gunnar can’t help but snicker at his grimace.

“You’re not as prissy as I thought, for a man wearing a dress,” he says.

“I - you - it’s not -” Anwar gives up his fight with the branch and glowers at him. “I’m a _physician_. From the medical university in Basra. Haven’t you ever seen a doctor before?”

Gunnar shrugs. “Old Siggi gave me a charm for fever when I was a boy. You don’t much look like her.”

“No gray hair and warts?”

“No breasts,” he answers, grinning. Anwar looks down at his flat chest, and blushes.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with charms and runes anyway,” he says ruefully. “My professors at the university don’t believe in magic - only in medicine and science. They taught us that everything in the world can be explained rationally.”

“And you?” Gunnar asks.

He’s never thought about it much one way or the other. He knows the old stories he heard as a child, the nine realms, all-father Odin with his one clever eye, the serpent that would swallow the world, and he supposes they must be true. There had been Old Siggi in his village, who made charms and found lost cattle and, after too much mead, threatened to curse people, which as far as Gunnar had seen had mostly consisted of drunken name calling. None of the men she’d tried to curse had ever died, anyway, although Falki had shouted bloody murder when he’d tripped and fallen in the pig slop. And as long as his farm continues to prosper, Gunnar doesn’t much care if it’s science or seidr or the gods that are behind it. But Anwar blanches when he asks, and his voice is rough and low when he answers.

“Our ship was nearly sunk by storm demons,” he says. “Half the crew was drowned. Hard to pretend it doesn’t exist, after that.”

He doesn’t look like he wants to talk about it, and it’s easier to let him steer the conversation to his voyage north, working on a trade ship carrying a cargo of spices and silver from the port in Cyprus. As they pick their way over boulders and tree roots Anwar tells him fantastic stories about werewolves, griffons, and all sorts of monsters. The life of a sea trader has always sounded dangerous to Gunnar, but even so he hadn’t thought it had so much risk of being eaten.

At the end of a rambling story about seeing a ghost in the Roman ruins of York, Anwar laughs sheepishly, and ducks his head. He says, “But I guess you’ve seen as much of that as I have.”

“Ghosts, or England?” he asks. “Never seen either.”

“You must have done some travelling,” Anwar protests. “Silk trading? Nothing?”

He doesn’t look like he believes Gunnar when he shakes his head. “What about the summer raids?”

“I’m a farmer,” Gunnar snaps. “Not a raider. I’ve never been.”

Anwar flinches at the harsh words. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t -” he stammers, and Gunnars feels guilty for losing his temper. How could Anwar have guessed it was a sore spot for him?

“I’d worry too much about my family,” he says more gently. “I can’t leave them alone here, while I chase after gold and glory in battle.”

Of course, your family. You just act so much like a sailor, I thought -” Then he seems to think better of that line of thought and cuts himself off. “I’ve obviously been spending too much time aboard ship, you shouldn’t listen to me.”

Easy enough to do, especially now that the path is getting rougher. This side of the ridge leading down to the road is craggy, prone to abrupt shifts and rockfall, and more than once they have to veer off the path to get around a tumble of boulders too high to easily climb over. Keeping steady footing takes most of Gunnar’s concentration, and Anwar’s prattling would be a dangerous distraction.

Although it might be less distracting than wondering what Anwar meant, saying he acted like a sailor. It preoccupies him enough that he doesn’t see how unstable the stone is until he’s just about to put his foot down on it, and then it’s too late. It gives under his weight, and sends him sprawling.

He’s still trying to tell up from down when Anwar appears at his side, all brisk and sure as he checks him over for injury.

“I’m fine,” Gunnar insists, and tries to shove him away, though it’s less convincing when he misses.

“No, you’re bleeding,” Anwar replies. “See?”

Gunnar doesn’t remember anything cutting him, but when he touches his fingers to the back of his neck, they come away tacky with blood, and the spot he touched starts throbbing.

“That’s nasty,” Anwar says. “Looks like something tried to take a bite out of you.”

He makes Gunnar sit while he cleans the cut with something sharp-smelling and green out of his bag. The liquid makes it sting more than it did already, and Gunnar tries to jerk away, but Anwar keeps a firm hand on his shoulder, and tells him he’ll appreciate it when his skin isn’t rotting off.

Once he’s patched up, Gunnar takes the lead again, although he pays more attention now to where he puts his feet. The path gets steeper, more of a climb down the face of the ridge than a walk, and when they drop the last few feet off the end of the path into the road, he groans in relief.

This far out from the trading posts the road isn’t as well maintained, rutted with cart tracks and sloppy with mud after last week’s rain, but it’s still easy enough to follow. Even a child could find their way to Kaupang from here, and Gunnar is ready to be on his way.

Anwar, though, seems reluctant to leave. He checks Gunnar’s bandages again, and asks a third time for directions - it’s still straight on - and then he just stands there like he’s waiting for something more, Gunnar couldn’t guess what.

“Sure you won’t come with me?” he asks finally. “It’ll be an adventure!”

Gunnar thinks Anwar means it to be teasing, but the words come out over-eager, and oddly strained. He stares at him flatly, not bothering to answer.

“Fine, fine,” Anwar says, raising his hands. “Far be it from me to make a friendly offer, I’ll just be going now.”

“Try not to get lost this time - I won’t come rescue you.”

He watches Anwar walk away down the road. Just before he reaches the bend that would take him out of sight, he turns back and waves.

“If you wake up tomorrow and change your mind, you know where to find me!” he shouts. And then he’s gone.

 

It’s a long walk through the forest back to the farm. By the time he gets to the valley, the sun’s below the treetops, throwing jagged shadows at odd angles across the dry grass. The cows will be impatient for him, he knows, and so will his wife.

The sound of shouting reaches him before he sees the farm. For a moment Gunnar tenses and grabs at his belt knife, sniffing the air for smoke and burning sod. It can’t be --

And then the shouting resolves itself into a thin, familiar voice, and he doesn’t have time to react before he’s tackled nearly off his feet.

“Hello there,” he says to the small boy clinging to his knees.

“Ma says you’re late,” his son says. “Did you catch a lot of fish?”

Gunnar shows the boy his empty hands. “How many fish did you catch today?”

“I caught a beetle!” he exclaims, beaming. He looks just like his mother when he smiles.

Gunnar grabs him by the waist, grinning at his delighted, breathless laugh when he swings him up and over his head. Instead of setting him back down, Gunnar settles him on his shoulders, and lets himself be steered the rest of the way to the longhouse.

His wife waits for them in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest, smiling at them fondly.

“So that’s where you ran off,” she says to the boy. “You brought me a husband.”

She kisses them both, Gunnar on the mouth, the boy on his cheek. Gunnar kneels so the boy can climb off his back, shoos him inside, and takes a second kiss for himself.

“I don’t see any fish,” his wife says.

“Not a bite.” Gunnar doesn’t know he’s going to lie until he says it. He doesn’t even know why, except that there was something - private, and almost unreal about what happened in the woods. The thought of Anwar is out of place in the prosaic shelter of the longhouse, and Gunnar finds he doesn’t want even the memory to intrude.

If she sees through him, she doesn’t say. It’s a plausible lie at least - river fishing this early in the spring is always unreliable, whatever Bjorn said - and when they move inside he sees that she has salted fish and winter cabbage already out of the stores for dinner, just in case he came back empty-handed.

He tends the animals while she cooks, and after dinner she spins wool yarn by the light of the fire while he works on carving a wooden horse. His son already has three wooden warriors, with stick swords and wool-scrap shirts, and Gunnar promised them mounts, and someday a village to raid. When the boy falls asleep on the floor at his feet, still holding one of his dolls, Gunnar carries him to bed.

  
  


_The deck rocks under his feet, the long steady swell of deep sea and no wind. For the first time in days the ocean is calm, flat as the shields hanging from the sides of the ship. The oars clack against the planks behind him, but his next shift isn’t for hours. There is land in the far distance, so impossibly green the men thought it was a mirage, until a day and a storm passed and it didn’t vanish. They will be there tomorrow, the chief says, or the day after. Wedged in the curve of the prow, out of the worst of the salt spray, Gunnar is sharpening his sword._

_The young man next to him is giddy at the sight of land, leaning so far off the side to see it approach his shirt is soaked through with brine. It is his first glimpse of a foreign shore, his first raid, but it is not Gunnar’s._

_Do you think they’ll come to meet us? the young man asks him. Or will they cower and hide like dogs?_

_He rubs the hilt of his untried sword, and Gunnar knows how ready he is to draw it. He was so young once too._

_They’ll fight. They always fight, he answers. He doesn’t bother to look up. When he tests his sword against his thumb it leaves a thin line of blood behind. The young man will learn, as Gunnar did. Or he’ll die._

_After a month at sea he can sleep through anything, watch changes, storms, mermaid song, it doesn’t matter. So it’s not the shouting that wakes him, but someone grabbing him roughly by the shoulder, shaking him. It is dark when he opens his eyes, and there are lights bobbing on the water, the unsteady flare of lanterns._

_Ship! It’s a ship! someone cries from the stern. The lights are drawing closer, and on the longship everything is noise and confusion as a score of men scramble for swords, axes and shields. The young man who had been keeping watch next to him, so eagerly awaiting his first battle, is nowhere to be seen. When he doesn’t move the hand on his shoulder shakes him harder._

_Wake up, damn you, wake up._

 

For a long time after he does, he stares at the roofbeams over his head, waiting for his heart to stop pounding and the taste of salt to fade from his lips. In her sleep his wife clings to his hand, but he doesn’t think she left the bruise on his shoulder.

 

He’s mostly forgotten the dream by morning. And the fragments that remain are soon pushed out of his head by the thought of the day’s work. Planting season is busy on the farm, and until they have the money to hire hands or his son is old enough to help it’s only Gunnar doing the plowing and sowing. He’s out in the fields before dawn with the ox and ard, and by mid-morning he’s sore, soaked with sweat, and already starting to burn in the sun.

Just after mid-day, he tries to plow through a stone, and the share of the ard snaps off in the ground. He can’t fix it in the field - he might not be able to fix it at all - and all of the spare shafts are in the longhouse. He tethers the ox to a stump at the edge of the field he hasn’t gotten around to clearing yet, and heads back home.

His wife is in the vegetable garden doing her own planting, and their son is helping her, although his handfuls of seeds are scattered more haphazardly that hers. Even after he gets the new shaft from his workbench Gunnar lingers, leaning lazily on the wall and watching them plant neat rows of carrots and turnips, and that’s why he’s still there when the woman comes.

They get few enough visitors down their path, especially in planting season when everyone’s busy on their own farms, but the woman walks with purpose toward the longhouse. As she gets closer, Gunnar can see that her dress, though travel-worn, is richly dyed and picked out in embroidered embellishment, and her long black hair is intricately braided and knotted under her headscarf. She carries herself like a queen, grander than the jarl’s wife serving mead at a banquet. Gunnar finds himself resisting the urge to drop to his knees.

“Welcome, my lady,” he calls, when she stops at the far fence post, but he doesn’t let his guard down. She might be grand, but a small and isolated farm could little afford to be incautious with strangers, not these days. “Lost your way?”

“I don’t believe so,” she says. “I was told I could find Gunnar Halfdanarson here.”

He doesn’t know her, he’s certain of that. Even at a glance she’s not a woman easily forgotten. But she’s looking at him like he’s exactly what she expected to find, and it makes him bristle, though he couldn’t say why.

“You’ve found him,” he replies gruffly.

“My name is Nala. A friend told me you might be able to lend me help. A young doctor I met in Basra.”

Gunnar doesn’t know what Anwar could have told her about him, or how - she didn’t come from the direction of Kaupang. It makes him suspicious, and he keeps one eye on her while he watches for the glint of sun on sword or arrowhead in the trees. He surreptitiously shifts his grip on the ard shaft, easier to drop it and go for his weapon.

“Do you need someone to plant a lot of cabbages?” he asks. “You do look underfed.”

“No,” she says, refusing to rise to the bait. “I need a bodyguard.”

He snorts. “Then look elsewhere. There’s plenty of hired swords in Kaupang or Hedeby who will be happy for your coin. I don’t fight.”

“Anwar told me you would say that.” Nala smiles knowingly at him.

“Then why come at all? I’m just a farmer, I can’t help you.”

She draws herself up. She’s slight, compared to him, but she still makes it look impressive, and Gunnar finds himself taking a step back. He clenches one hand on the fence rail, unwilling to be intimidated.

“Hired swords won’t do - they aren’t loyal, except to their pockets. This is a dangerous undertaking, and I need someone I can trust with my life.” She pauses, and fixes him with a level stare. “I need one of the Valsgard.”

Gunnar freezes at the word, eyes widening in spite of himself. The rail creaks under his hand, then splinters, and he still can’t move. Only the sound of his son’s voice, piping a question to his wife behind them in the garden, shakes him out of his shock.

He grabs Nala’s arm and drags her away from the house, away from his family. He’s too rough with her, digging his fingers into her bare arm, and she protests, but he doesn’t care.

“You know nothing of the Valsgard, if you talk of trust,” he says, face pale with anger. “It’s not a name you should throw around so easily, where other people can hear. Where my _wife_ can hear.”

He doesn’t think she could, from where they were standing, but it’s enough to make him shudder. Out here, the Valsgard are little more than stories to frighten children, but last year a farm had been burned to the ground, the entire household killed, and rumor said it was retribution for what the husband had done on raids with the Valsgard in his youth. No one had even known he’d been a raider, and Gunnar remembers his wife’s horror at the man’s punishment, enacted so crudely on his unwitting family. He can’t bear the thought of being the source of that horror for her.

Nala follows his gaze back to the garden. When she sees his wife and son, her calm mask slips for a moment, and he thinks she looks regretful.

“She doesn’t know?” she asks quietly. He realizes he’s still holding her arm, and lets her go, trying to pull back his anger at her question. It’s been a long time since he lost control like this, and it frightens him a little, how easy it was.

“Because there’s nothing to know. I’m a farmer,” Gunnar insists.

Her lips thin as she looks at him, and Gunnar feels like she could lay bare all his secrets at a glance.

“A farmer who reaches for his weapon at the first sign of trouble?” she asks. “A farmer with an Englishman’s knife on his belt?”

He fumbles for his knife, and nearly drops it. But when he holds it out, it’s the same knife he’s always had, a little dull, with a carving of a deer on the bone handle.

“My father made it for our wedding,” he says, offering it to her. She takes it without a word and studies it for a long moment, her face inscrutable, before she hands it back. He doesn’t know what she sees, but he doesn’t think she believes him, and he isn’t sure what further proof he can offer.

“You’re bleeding,” she says then, giving him another sharp look, and Gunnar instinctively looks at his hand. There are still a few splinters from the fence in his palm, but none of them had gone deep enough to bleed. She shakes her head and touches a graceful hand to her throat, and when he does the same he feels a sticky wetness there. He follows it up to the back of his neck, and a sluggishly bleeding cut that should have already closed itself.

“Just a scratch,” he says stiffly, wiping his bloody fingers on his trousers. “None of your concern.”

“If you work for me -” she starts.

“I won’t.”

Gunnar doesn’t have anything more to say to her. He turns back to the house, back to his family and the field and the ox he left tied to a tree stump. Let her stand here, if she wants. She’ll tire of it eventually, go back to the port towns and find herself a self-styled bravo with a flashy sword to impress her, and be better for it than she would be with him.

Instead, she chases after him.

“Wait, please -” She grabs onto his sleeve, and he yanks it out of her hand.

“Why does it matter?” he demands. “You’ve made it this far without a bodyguard, haven’t you?”

“There was - someone. A friend, who would have sacrificed anything to protect us.”

“Then hire him,” Gunnar says.

Nala bites her lip, and pauses. “I don’t know where he is,” she says at last. “But you remind of him very much. And he would have helped me.”

She reaches out and touches Gunnar’s face, lightly, fingers barely brushing his cheek. “I’m sorry,” she says, and before he can react, she leaves.

When he goes back to the garden, his wife asks who the woman was, and Gunnar tells her she was looking for someone else.

 

_It’s his fifteenth kill, and he can taste blood all the way back to the North. The old man had begged for his life, sobbing on his knees, begged for them to spare his wife and children. But his house was full of gold, and it would have been dishonorable to take it without a fight. The Valsgard were not thieves. So they put his house to the torch, and slaughtered the family as they ran out from the fire. When his wife and children were dead Gunnar gutted the old man, and left him clawing at the dirt as they moved on to his neighbor._

_Back home they feast in the chieftain’s mead hall, celebrating the successful raid, and Gunnar drinks enough to wash the blood and smoke out of his mouth. When he’s too drunk to stand two of his fellow warriors carry him to a bench by the fire and spread him on his stomach. One of them holds his arms down, while the other cuts his shirt off._

_He struggles, until he sees the third man with the needle and the bowl of wood ash, and he realizes that after three years of raids he’s earned the right to the Valsgard’s mark on his skin._

_The men joke about the raid, about the old man’s face when his guts spilled through his fingers, and Gunnar drifts in a daze of drink and pain. The tattooist makes little effort to be gentle as he carves black knots into Gunnar’s back, and blood drips on the filthy floor, but this is one more test of his nerve and he swallows his moans._

_Wake up, they say, Gunnar wake up, and he realizes it’s over. They drag him to the front of the hall so everyone can see, and once they’ve toasted his victory the chieftain gifts him his share, ten gold coins and a dagger taken from the old man’s house. He smears it with blood to make it his, blood and spilled ink from the wound on his back, and watches it soak into the leather-wrapped hilt and leave a stain that will never come clean._

 

He jerks awake with his knife in his hand, clenched so hard it leaves a mark on his palm. And it is his knife, he’d swear to it, swear to all the nights he spent by the fire watching his father carve the sinuous deer curling around the handle, but the memory of blood-stained leather is slick under his fingers, and it makes his stomach twist. He wonders again what Nala thought she saw when she looked at it.

It’s not a raider’s knife, whatever Nala thinks, whatever his fingers tell him, but that knowledge isn’t enough anymore. He crosses the room as silently as he’s able, trying not to wake his wife and son. There is a chest against the wall by the loom. Mostly it holds his wife’s linens and a few bits of finery, his son’s forgotten toys, but there are a few old things of his he’d brought with him when he married. A belt his mother embroidered for him, an iron charm from his brother, just small things he doesn’t have use for anymore.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for - proof, or the absence of proof, or a way to shut up the too-familiar voices haunting his dreams - but it’s the only place to start.

He’s still staring at the contents of the chest when someone gently lays a hand on his arm.

“Looking for something?” his wife asks him softly, and he starts. He hadn’t heard her rise. The dim flickering light of the hearthfire catches in her hair, and she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

He closes the chest, tucking something small into his pocket before she can see it.

“Nothing,” he says. “Go back to bed.” And he follows her.

 

He spends the whole next day waiting for something else odd to happen, but it doesn’t, and the anticipation leaves him tense and on edge. He drives the animals harder than usual, and he snaps at his son, when his games bring him too close to where Gunnar is working. It’s almost a relief, when he comes back to the house from reaping hay in the far field, and finds that someone has broken in.

The latch on the door has been lifted, and when Gunnar eases open the door, he can see the intruder on the far side of the dim room, kneeling on the floor and groping under the benches for valuables. They have nothing worth stealing but the cows, but that doesn’t seem to have dampened the thief’s enthusiasm yet.

Gunnar crosses the room in two strides and drags the thief out from under the bench by the collar. And then he sees her face, and almost drops her in surprise. She’s scrawny and undersized, hair crudely chopped off around her earlobes, dressed in several layers to hide that all of them are many times patched, clearly a vagabond - and also, clearly, a girl.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asks her. She twists out of his grip, and darts away when he tries to grab her again. He expects her to bolt for the door, but instead she just stands there, glaring at him.

“I was looking for your sword,” she says, as if the answer should be obvious. “It has to be here somewhere, there aren’t that many places to hide it.”

She tries to clamber up one of the poles into the roofbeams, and snarls at him when he yanks her leg and sends her sprawling on the floor instead. If Gunnar did have a sword, it would be pointed at her throat.

“You’d be too small to lift it,” he says, and she rolls her eyes.

“It’s not for me,” she says. “It’s for you, because you’re being stupid and I’m tired of it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Yes, you do,” she retorts. “Your name is Gunnar. You used to be in the Valsgard, and now you’re a silk merchant on a ship called the Providence. When the water-thieves kidnapped us you let them dress you up like a girl because you wouldn’t fight me. You know who I am, and you knew who Nala was, and who Anwar was, but you won’t admit it.”

“I’m a farmer,” he says. “And you’re crazy.”

She laughs, bitterly, and Gunnar can see the shadow of old wounds on her face.

“I’m not crazy. I’m just the only one willing to say to your face that none of this is real.”

It feels real. The packed earth floor is hard under his feet, and the oak planks in the walls are solid. He can smell cooking smoke and dried fish, and wet wool where his shoes got soaked by a puddle. He can remember kissing his son this morning, and laying with his wife last night. He doesn’t want to believe her.

“You were reaping hay today, weren’t you?” she asks. He doesn’t know why it matters, and he nods. “And yesterday you were planting, when Nala came. And the day before it was barely spring. You can’t believe this, it doesn’t make any sense!”

“You’re lying,” he says. He would have noticed if the seasons had changed like that. The hay he was reaping had been planted months ago, he was certain of it.

“Then why are you still bleeding?”

He opens his mouth to tell her that he’s not, but before he can get the words out he looks down, and sees the fat drops of blood on the floor at his feet. As soon he does, the wound on his neck starts to throb again, like it was waiting for him to remember.

“I fell,” he says.

“No.” She shakes her head. “That didn’t happen. Something is feeding on you. It’s making you think this is real but it’s not. And if you stay it’s going to kill you.”

Gunnar stares at her. In the abrupt quiet between them, he can hear the blood still dripping off his throat. His wife’s voice carries through the open window, a tuneless song about sheep shearing as she works in the shed.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says flatly. “None of you.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” the girl says. “I’m going to find your sword, and prove it to you.”

She lunges for the chest, and Gunnar grabs her around the middle with both arms. She fights like a cat, kicking and thrashing and clawing at his arms with her nails, but she barely weighs a thing, and he refuses to loosen his hold on her.

“You bastard, let me go,” she shrieks, and her voice is raw and desperate now. “I’m not leaving you here, you can’t make me, let me _go_!”

Her tears burn where they fall on his hands, but Gunnar ignores it, like he ignores the boot that catches him in the knee. While she struggles and swears at him he kicks open the door, drags her outside, and dumps her over the fence. She looks like she’s ready to scale it and go after him again, and then his wife comes around the side of the house to see what all the noise is, his son clinging to her skirt. The girl gives them a wide-eyed, anguished look, and bolts.

 

_The village is peaceful and plain, a handful of farms scattered along the verdant curve of the river, and it reminds Gunnar of his village back home. They have nothing worth taking, no gold, no silver, but that doesn’t matter when the Valsgard is hot for blood. They burn the farms, and when the villagers try to run they cut them down and leave the bodies in the smoldering fields with the animal carcasses._

_When there is nothing left to burn, they leave, empty-handed and still unsated. He keeps his sword drawn, in case there is anyone left alive in the ruins, but it doesn’t stop the old woman from attacking him._

_He feels a blow from behind and turns, furious. The old woman raises her walking stick and strikes him again, and a third time, and a fourth. She’s shrunken with age, withered skin tight on her trembling hands, and it takes all her strength just to hold the stick steady. It’s not enough to hurt him, barely enough to sting, and he’s too bewildered to step away or knock her down._

_The other men start laughing at her, and Gunnar laughs too, at how feeble she is, how foolish to think she could frighten off the Valsgard with a stick. She keeps hitting him, though, screeching abuse in a voice as wizened as her face._

_Filth, she calls him as she lands another blow. Beasts. Wake up and see what you’ve done here._

_He’s seen fear in people’s eyes, before he killed him, seen anger and shock and even resignation. He’s never seen someone look at him with such disgust. Even after she dies he can feel it on him, and it leaves a sick curl of something in his stomach that might be shame._

 

Gunnar doesn’t sleep, after that. For the rest of the night he sits by the hearth fire watching the logs burn down one by one, and every time he closes his eyes he sees the old woman’s face.

 

It’s washing day, and his wife drags all the clothes and bedclothes outside to be scrubbed clean. His son plays at sword-fighting in the yard, never quite out of her sight. Gunnar, who should still be cutting hay, leans on the fence and watches them. After a while, he realizes that someone is standing next to him, watching them too, and somehow he isn’t startled.

“She’s really lovely,” Sinbad says. He absently tucks a lock of hair behind his ear, and it falls into his eyes again when he leans forward to see her better. “I’m impressed.”

Gunnar sighs. “Now is the part where you tell me she isn’t real, yes?”

“You’ve heard the line before, huh?” He grins cockily, and not for the first time Gunnar wonders how he’s lived this long, without someone knocking it off his face, but there’s something ugly and frightened around the edges of it, and his hands are clenched white-knuckled into fists. “It’s still true, though. This is just a very nice dream, my friend.”

“I know.” He doesn’t mean to say it, and he regrets it as soon as he does. Sinbad’s head shoots up in surprise, and he almost overbalances.

“You do? But when Rina came out, she said -”

“She is very persuasive,” he admits. “And - loud.” There is still a bruise on his leg where she kicked him, but she made her point.

“She said we were being too nice,” Sinbad says. “I guess she was right. Was that really all it took?”

Gunnar hesitates, then takes something out of his pocket, and sets it on the fence rail between them. Sinbad stares at the wooden toy horse, and Gunnar can tell he doesn’t understand.

“What is it?” he asks, puzzled. In the yard, Gunnar’s son charges the drying line, and his wife barely catches him before he lays siege to the washtub. She turns him around, and he marches off to duel a fencepost.

“I found it yesterday,” Gunnar says. “I remember making it for him, but…”

Sinbad picks it up, carelessly, and Gunnar wants to snatch it out of his hand. He frowns as he turns it over. “It’s rotten,” he says. “Mold all the way through.”

Gunnar nods. “It’s been buried for a long time. Just like he has.”

He hadn’t wanted to believe what Rina said. But then he had remembered opening the chest, finding its contents all filthy and rotted, streaked with mud and mold as if they’d been under the earth for years. Only his things had been untouched, and when he had remembered that, he had remembered everything.

“Wait,” Sinbad says. “Cook said we had to break you out of the dream to wake you up. If you knew, then what are we still doing here?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Gunnar says. “But I’m staying.”

“You’re staying,” Sinbad repeats.

“Yes.”

“Here.”

“ _Yes_.”

“With a bunch of ghosts.”

“With my _family_ ,” Gunnar growls, losing his patience. The words hang in between them.

“With your fake family,” Sinbad says. “Never mind your friends. We came here to save you because we need you - because we care about you. And you’ll turn your back on us for a lie?”

Gunnar - remembers. Anwar with his sleeves rolled up, charting maps and learning sailors’ knots with all the enthusiasm of a boy at his lessons. Rina in the House of Games, her painted face unable to disguise the misery in her eyes. Nala walking straight-backed and proud to give herself to death. Sinbad jumping to his defense against the Khaima, before he even knew his crimes. The six years after he left the North, going from ship to ship, barely speaking to his crewmates, so different from what he’d had those few weeks on the Providence.

“I’ll miss you,” he says quietly.

“I’m sick of arguing,” Sinbad says. Gunnar doesn’t know when he got so close. “If I have to, I’ll give you something to come back to.”

Sinbad kisses him. Drags him deeper into it, fierce and eager and hard enough to hurt where he worries Gunnar’s lip with his teeth. Gunnar groans at the kiss, at the unexpected heat that burns through him. And when he does, when he presses into Sinbad for more - the dream dissolves around them, color trickling out of the edges of his vision until the only familiar thing remaining is Sinbad’s face.

 

After that things get a little confused. He remembers Sinbad catching him when his knees buckle, almost too weak to stand after being fed on for so long. He doesn’t remember them killing the spider-like desire demon that had imprisoned him - they shove his sword into his hand, in case it gets away from them and comes after its prey, but Sinbad is the one who taunts it out of hiding, and Rina the one to scale it and bury a slim dagger in its head. He’s dizzy and sick, the ground sliding under him when he tries to walk, and the unfamiliar forest feels less real than the dream did. Anwar mutters something about toxins, and he and Sinbad both get an arm around Gunnar and half carry him back to the ship.

On the ship, with one of Cook’s meals and some proper sleep and the seeping bite marks on his neck cleaned and bandaged, Gunnar feels more steady. But after his first awkward apologies he avoids everyone else. He’s grateful, as he had slurred feverishly on their shambling run out of the forest. But he’s guilty, too, and he doesn’t know how much Sinbad told them, if they know how close he came to abandoning them. He does his chores in gruff silence, and even Anwar has the good sense not to question him too much. Once his turn at the watch is over, he escapes into one of the more private spots on the upper deck, hidden from midship by the stern rigging.

He’s only there for a few minutes before Sinbad drops down out of the rigging next to him.

“No one’s mad at you, you know,” he says, folding his legs under him and settling on the deck as if he has no intention of moving. “It’s hardly the first time someone on this ship has let their feelings get the better of them.”

His shirt is open, and Gunnar can see the scratches from the siren’s claws on his chest, still healing. He looks away.

“I was weak,” he says, not meeting Sinbad’s eyes. “I knew it wasn’t real, but I wanted it so much -”

After six years, he thought he’d accepted what he he’d done, what he was. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, finding he'd been wrong.

Sinbad shrugs. “It could have done the same to any of us. If it was me, and I had the chance to be with my Amah again? To see Jamil? I don’t know if I could have left, either.”

He rubs his cursed necklace absently, and looks out across the bow of the ship, toward Basra. They are only a week away now, but for all Sinbad’s urgency, they all know there is nothing good there waiting for him.

They sit in silence for awhile, and Gunnar lets the words sink in. They don’t make the re-opened wounds of loss and failure ache less - only time can do that, if anything can. But knowing he’s not alone in his grief makes it a little less - raw, and it’s kind of Sinbad to offer it to him.

“So, that kiss,” he says finally, as if it hasn’t been weighing on his mind since it happened. “That was - just to shock me out of the dream? Nothing more?”

Sinbad leans back on his hands and grins at him, wide-open and lazy and brilliant, as clear an invitation as Gunnar’s ever seen. “That,” he says cheerfully, “very much depends on you.”

Gunnar doesn’t give him a chance to say anything more.


End file.
